10 years of Aristi by its founder, Harj Singh.

10 years of Aristi by its founder, Harj
Singh

The word Aristi has three meanings. It means ‘security’ in Sanskrit, one of the oldest of all attested human languages. It means ‘excellence’ in Greek. It is the name of a village in the idyllic, calm and relaxing Epirus region of Greece.

These three
things embody the Aristi brand – the first word for security, providing you
with security excellence and instilling a sense of calm by demystifying what is
often a complex and confusing subject matter.

Before Aristi

I managed a
team of cyber security consultants for a large technology company that had
acquired the consultancy business I worked for. Over time, I became frustrated with
the lack of speed in responding to the ever-changing needs of our clients.

Be that change
internal or external, there was a lot of bureaucracy and red tape surrounding
our ability to help them effectively. The company also lacked a sense of
purpose – my team provided unbiased cyber security consultancy but when senior
management realised the trust we had developed with our clients they wanted my
team to recommend our own technology products.

I believed
customers deserved flexibility and independence in their service and wanted to
provide them with a different experience.

This gave me
the idea for Aristi – a company that has a real sense of purpose and believed
in the work it achieves.

10 years on

Looking back, if
there was one thing I wish I’d known before setting up Aristi, it’s the time
and dedication it would take to create a successful business.

Running your
own business comes with a sacrifice of personal time. When you work in a large
organisation, from the end of the working day, your time is often your own.
It’s difficult to draw this line when running your own business. You always
have to be switched on and that work and personal life balance is difficult to
achieve and needs firm discipline.

Large
businesses also have teams of experts around you handling sales, marketing,
supplier relationships, finance etc. In a small business, you must wear these
hats yourself.

I would do it
all again though as its extremely rewarding when you get it right.

Looking forward

We’ve spent the
last 10 years building a brand. This was one of the main challenges for us. As
a small business, you have to do more to prove who you are and your
credibility.

To do this,
we’ve focused on hard work and dedication to deliver on all the promises we
have made and ensured that we haven’t promised anything we cannot deliver. We have
built a business with both personality and culture through embedding core
values into everything we do.

We now want to build
on this – to create a platform that successfully enables us to ensure every one
of our client businesses is empowered to achieve their vision, profitably.

The market has
opened up in the last 10 years, organisations now understand that you can get a
higher quality service and more flexibility from a smaller company – this is
something we want to continue to prove and develop.

Predictions

Technology is infiltrating
almost every aspect of our lives. It
moves so quickly, it’s difficult to predict what’s going to happen next.

The jobs we
take for granted today might not exist in five years’ time but we are many
years away from robots taking over our jobs!

As businesses
strive to create competitive advantages, the use of information and technology to
create efficiencies and improve service delivery will increase. We are already
seeing a huge shift to cloud and managed services.

However, many
businesses leaders think that by moving all their data to the cloud solves all
of their problems. Cloud providers like Microsoft and Amazon operate a shared
responsibility model – they are responsible for physical security and elements
of network and host security, but the customer is responsible for the rest. In
other words, if you have poor data management processes when that data is on
your premises, moving it to the cloud just shifts the risk to another location.
It’s still your risk.

Cyber security
will become more relevant to businesses and this challenge cannot be solved by
technology alone. It’s no surprise that most data breaches are due to people
making mistakes. Businesses will need to develop cyber strategies that align to
their corporate strategies enabling the balance between ‘good enough security’
and the ability to ‘do business’.

At Aristi, our focus is on helping you to embed best practice information governance and cyber security into your company culture so that it becomes part of the DNA of your organisation, where people do the right thing by default. This isn’t just about training your team to know the risks, it’s about embedding processes into your company culture so you can measure their success.

Harj Singh is the founder and CEO of Aristi and has over 25 years of experience in the IT and Security industry, gained through technical and managerial roles. Harj has has helped clients in the public and private sectors to develop and implement security strategies and solutions that add value to their business.

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